I sometimes help a small office with a few issues. About two months ago, they were complaining of poor internet performance. Long story short, I found one person running Carbonite on a Mac that was pushing 2mb uploads all day. Shut down Carbonite and the problem -- which I saw as a 2mb consumption in a traffic graphic -- disappeared. I adjusted that user's Carbonite so that it would consume as much bandwidth as it could. (I forget the name of the setting.)
In that case, I went on-site and turned off everything until I found the problem workstation.
I think the problem is occurring again, indeed there is now a 2mb consumption hum in the traffic graph. I'd like to be a lot smarter about figuring out what's happening.
How would you approach identifying the workstation responsible?
(FWIW: Unless something has changed, Carbonite will not release enough information that would allow me to throttling those connections. Search Google and you'll see a whole lotta complainin' about this.)
Cheers,
Mike
Best way to find the device causing the problem would be to use package inspection (-> sources!) at your router.
Also have in mind that there are many other technical reasons which can cause a enormous slowdown of your network performance e.g. electrical issues!
And after that: Get somebody who setups traffic shapping at your location!
After firing the administrator who has not put in policies in place to distribute bandwidth equal (a switch on the router / firewall)...
...I just log onto the firewall, look at the current traffic by source IP address (i.e. the internal one) and then make a ping -a to find the corresponding machine name.
Not that this is ever possible, because your backbone has 7 traffic priorities and does - within one priority - distribute bandwidth equal if needed (I.e. one can not block all bandwidth). You can do that transfer of your colleage all day and noone would notice. Not even ping, voip or our financial data streams would realize that.